The Conflicting Similarities Of The Slavic Languages

I have been a learner of languages since my age was in single figures. I learn most in a systematic way that babies and children use to deduce meaning; this helps me to use my instincts rather than memory in part in order to retain words and phrases. This comes in very useful when faced with various false friends, such as the obvious ones: actually (=en effet) and actuellement (=at the moment), or librairie (=bookshop) and library (=bibliothèque). But the staggering differences between similar words in the Slavic languages are enough to make Noam Chomsky consider hitting the bottle.

If you want to learn a language, sometimes those that are similar to yours are not necessarily always the easiest ones. There is a reason why many Asian people speak better English than French or Spanish native speakers, and it’s not just because of national stereotypes – it often has to do with the fact that English is very different from Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese or Hindi. Learning a language that is very different to your own helps in many ways to learn that language better, because you are working from a blank canvas, whereas an English speaker learning French is really adapting a lot of already familiar words into a different accent and sometimes a different part of speech. For that reason, it makes learning close languages quite a hit-and-miss experience.

So it is all the more astonishing to take a look at how tightly-bound the Slavic languages are, yet can have totally different meanings for the exact same words. Take Czech and Polish: they are almost mutually intelligible when written, and if spoken at a reasonable pace using simple vocabulary, a meaningful conversation is not out of the question. Russian is of course the go-to Slavic language, and I would say a good one to start with. But I would also say Czech is probably the best language to begin your Slavic learning adventures, as it has a very logical grammar, is spoken exactly as it is written, and doesn’t lean too heavily on the hard and soft consonant rules of Russian or Polish. This will help you understand then use basic Slovak.

Czech and Slovak are so similar, it can sometimes appear quite puzzling to non-speakers to see multilingual instructions or user guides where both languages appear side-by-side with very tiny differences. To some, it is baffling that a company would go to the trouble of bothering to get two translations done for both languages. But they would be wrong – you see, there are often great chasms of difference between them, where they use wildly different words camouflaged deep in the seemingly identical texts. All will become clearer (or should I say less unclear?) later on…

Once you have got your head round Czech and Slovak, you can tackle the complex alveolar fricatives of Polish. If you have Russian as well, there is now nothing stopping you from venturing into Belarusian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, then Macedonian, Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian and Slovenian, some of those being almost identical languages. At the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, the Croatian and Serbian delegations at bilateral gatherings often took along their own interpreters in order to appear sovereign. Those languages are so similar, it would be like someone showing up to a party with a mirror and telling everyone the image in there was someone else. Imagine the Austrians and Germans or Americans and Australians doing that.

Now you have opened the Slavic box, you may as well enjoy the fruits of your labour. Knowing a couple of them means, because they are really very similar to an almost incestuous nature, you can understand on a passive level almost all the others: just beware of the utter madness of the Slavic False Friends Network; this is where you need to hold on to something sturdy because things are about to get a little freaky…

Here is an idea of what you face:

The Czech for “girl” is divka but in Polish dziwka is a woman who charges per hour for her affections. It gets worse: the Polish for “I am seeking” is szukam, but šukam in Czech means “I’m having sex”. Whatever you do, try not to confuse the two, or you may end up with your trousers down. Literally.

You may also have some difficulties keeping up with dates: the Czech month of May is květen, but the Polish kwiecien is April. So make sure you don’t show up a month late for an interview in Prague. Then there is the astonishing (but no less magnificent) difference between Czech and Croatian srpen/srpanj. In Czech, srpen is August, but srpanj in Croatian is July. This is one of the more romantic stories of the Slavic languages: the Croatian word for August is kolovoz, as many months are named after what is most prevalent in nature and agriculture at that time, known as the labours of the month. Let me enlighten you: srp in Czech is a sickle, because srpen (August) was the time of the year it was used in the fields, but in Croatia, further south, it was brought out a whole month earlier. The meaning of Kolovoz is even more remarkable: kolo is a wheel, and voz comes from the root voziti, meaning to drive, and together they signify it’s the month when the grain has to be taken in. So August is known as “harvest month”. I love these factoids about languages, and I will touch on the months in a forthcoming post, as they really are worth gushing over.

One of the most extreme examples of this is what the Russians did to the word “red”. The word in Czech for “red” is červený, but in Russian it is красный, pronounced krasniy. However krásný in Czech means “beautiful”, and once upon a time also did in Russian, but the word for “beautiful” was converted into “red”, hence “Red Square” was originally meant to be known as “Beautiful Square”. Some people say it was the Soviets looking for a way to market their ideology, but its meaning had morphed a long time before they came along.

You can appreciate how certain opinions can be formed when it comes to misadventures with words: the Polish zachód refers to the west (logically, it means sunset) Czech záchod is the toilet, which if mixed up could cause irreparable damage to a friendship if you tell someone who invites you to their place that their garden is to the west of their house.

Then there’s pivnice/piwnica and sklep/sklep. In Czech, if you want to go out for some atmosphere and beer, you go to a pivnice. Pivo is the Czech word for beer, and the -nice suffix usually signifies a place, so this is literally a “beer place”. But in Polish, if someone invites you to their piwnica, you should know them very well, as it is the cellar (pivnice in Polish is piwiarnia). Anyone who has passed a sklep polski is probably aware that it means “Polish shop”. However, if a Czech invites you to their sklep, you should be equally well-acquainted with them, as sklep is a Czech cellar.

Once more, if you want čerstvý chléb in Czechia, you are asking for fresh bread. But if you go to dinner at someone’s house in Poland, don’t tell them the bread is czerstwy as you are saying that it is stale.

So as you see, the Slavic languages can be delightful, but at the same time quite a minefield to avoid making semantic mistakes. But I cannot recommend highly enough learning one or more of them, because you get to see a whole new side to life, and this is where you really do develop a new soul. You can’t avoid it, because those languages are so different from Germanic and Latin-based ones, that you need a whole new personality for them.

For this reason, and for the abundance of examples above, it is no good learning just the words in parrot form; it makes no sense to do that, as you lose out on the history, mentality and mindset, feeling, experiences, or the collective memory of everyone who speaks that language. An example of this is in the very words they use to describe the world around them. This goes for all languages, but especially Slavic, as they contain far stronger connections to natural phenomena, emotions, people and animals. But that is for another article.

In Praise Of The German Language

For years, German has been mistakenly perceived as “ugly” or “difficult”. It is not hard to point to words or phrases that bear out this opinion, such as “Knoblauchzehe” (clove of garlic), “Wasserrutsche”, (water slide), “Verdauungskanal” (alimentary canal), “Unabhängigkeitserklärung” (declaration of independence), “Haftpflichtversicherung” (liability insurance), or “Sechstausendachthundertneunundzwanzig” (the number 6,829). To the untrained eye, it looks like someone at the Goethe-Institut forgot to use the space bar when codifying the language, but actually there is a certain unmistakable clarity and purposefulness about it. Before you decide to make some disparaging comments and close this page, let me explain…

English and French are the main working languages in a vast number of international institutions and organisations, such as the European Union, NATO, the EBU, and the African Union. Many linguists point out that it is often to the advantage of those organisations to continue using English and French, because if formulated well, rules, laws, publicity, reports and correspondence can be ambiguous enough to be interpreted in multiple ways. But this is almost impossible in German, as what you read is what you get.

Several translator friends of mine working at the EU have told me that they and many of their colleagues, when translating documents into their own languages, often wait until the German version comes out before they confirm publication, just to check they understood everything correctly. I also know that the German translators in one of the EU institutions know this, and as such they are extremely thorough-going in their execution of their work; living up to the stereotype, one might say. They have such a huge following among other linguistic staff (this is the nearest any translator will ever get to having a fan club), they are frequently on the phone to the English or French department to ask for clarification from the original writers.

German is a language which lays bare the very essence of a thing, either abstract or real, in a way that the Latin-derived languages cannot. Something similar can be said of other Germanic languages, and all this has overlaps in English: at least the Germanic side of that schizophrenic Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Danish-French-Friesian tongue spoken by billions worldwide. To demonstrate this, I will take several words or phrases and break them down.

BARE DEFINITIONS

To define a thing, like a tree that bears apples, English opts for “apple tree”, a very easy and logical compound noun. German settles on “Apfelbaum” in the same way. In both cases, the two words in the construction are nouns; but here’s the clever bit: the words in the first part “apple/Apfel” are treated as adjectives, with the difference that German clumps them together, whereas English divides them into two words. Sometimes. But not always. German is incredibly consistent in closing the gap in their compound nouns, whereas English is rather wishy-washy, often opting for two words, but sometimes joining them together (e.g. toothbrush, sunrise, shopkeeper), or annoyingly adding a hyphen (e.g. fire-fighter, care-giver), just to provide some flamboyant variety and give writers of English vocabulary books an air of indecisiveness.

Because German puts all these words together, not only are they very easy to locate in a search engine, they are also remarkably explanatory in their meanings. So let us take a look at one or two of the words above:

The German word for liability insurance is Haftpflichtversicherung. It may seem like quite a nightmarish thing to find as the title to an official letter from an insurance company, often attached to a bill, but it has a certain descriptive nature about it. There’s Haft, then there’s Pflicht, and finally Versicherung. Haft is the challenging part to explain – it means detention or imprisonment, but can also mean binding responsibility; Pflicht means duty or obligation; together they mean liability. And Versicherung is the insurance. So, breaking it down like this we can determine that this insurance is what you pay to get you out of trouble when you have been a naughty boy or girl.

German does its best to lay everything out bare so that there is very little room for misinterpretation. English and French are full of homophones, homographs and homonyms that can only be determined by looking at the context of the rest of the sentence or paragraph the word is found in.

PREFIXES ARE A GERMAN SPECIALITY

Let us run with this idea a little further: the last word, Versicherung, contains the prefix Ver-. This is a most remarkable and versatile trinity of letters, and can signify quite a lot of things, often negative, such as:

1. how a situation may end up

verarmen = to sink into poverty / verderben = to decay or go to waste

“Arm” means “poor”, so the “ver-“ gives it an element of bad luck. Add “-en” and it becomes a verb. It manifestly means “to end up poor”. The same with “Derb”, meaning “dirt”, so it more or less means “turn to dirt”.

2. doing something you disapprove of

verarschen = make fun of / verschlafen = oversleep / verspielen = gamble something away

“Arsch” means “arse”, and the “ver-“ lets you know it wasn’t a nice thing to do, so it would maybe end up in English as “to arse about with someone”. Therefore, “schlafen” and “spielen” mean “to sleep” and “to play” respectively, and the “ver-“ prefix giving us the idea that you slept or played in a way that ended badly. The explanation is long, but the end result is succinct and very easy to grasp.

But it’s not only negative:

3. to bring to a conclusion

vermelden = to announce something / verbleiben = to remain in place / verknüpfen = to link up

“Melden” means “report” or “notify” and the “ver-” prefix allows us to know it is something that reaches its conclusion, the same with the others.

Another very revealing prefix is Ur-. It appears in a lot of words, like Urwald, Ursprung, Ursache, Urquell. Its origins tell a very instructive tale too. Ur- means, at its most fundamental level “original” or “primary”, as in the very first or the earliest.

1. “Urwald” is what we call rain forest, but German speakers label “primary forest”.

2. “Ursprung” means “origin” or “provenance”, so think about this: in the “-sprung” part of Ursprung, like the English -spring from the word “offspring”, it means exactly that; something like a combination of “transferral”, “separation” or “jump” with a preposition on the beginning, so Ursprung means “source” or “provenance”: literally “original leap”.

3. “Ursache” means “cause” or “reason”. “Sache” means “thing” or “issue”, so “Ursache” says exactly what it’s supposed to: by adding “ur” to “sache”, it literally means “original matter”.

4. “Urquell”, if anyone doesn’t already know, is the second word of one of Czechia’s most famous beers, Pilsner Urquell. The word Quell or Quelle means spring or water source, and adding “Ur” on the beginning turns it into a well. The Czech name for this beer, Prazdroj, means exactly the same thing: pra- is the Slavic equivalent of Ur- and zdroj means “spring” or “water source” too.

COINAGES

German is a language that does exactly what it says in the handbook. The difference between German and the Latin languages, though, is that because of this, nearly no new words can be coined in German unless you take two or three existing words and put them together. So any new coinages tend to be borrowed from other languages, mainly English, French or Latin. What I mean is German has a propensity for recycling already existing words to create new senses. For example, the German word for “glove” is “Handschuh”, literally “hand shoe”. Why invent a new word, when this creation fits like a… uhm… a glove?!

However, German is by no means a poor language: there are a great number of words in German that require explanations in other languages, and here are some of my favourites:

Sollbruchstelle: this is a word every language needs. It means the predetermined point that a machine or device will break or stop working properly. Cynics often believe their fridge or dishwasher is programmed to stop working one day in order to make you buy another one. That’s more or less what this means. Among other significations, “Soll” can be translated as “target”, “Bruch” means “break” or “crash”, and “Stelle” can mean “point”, so put all the words together, and there you have it: “target breaking point” in one word.

Sturmfrei: a great word, literally “storm-free”, used by kids and teens to say “I’m the only one at home; so if you want to come over, we can get up to all kinds of shenanigans”.

Fernweh: another one we should consider using, it means the opposite of “Heimweh”, what English calls “homesickness”. “Heim” means “home” and “Weh” means “pain”, so if we replace it with “Fern”, meaning “far” or “distant”, it means something we nearly all experienced in 2020: the sadness of not being in one of your favourite locations far away.

Verschlimmbessern: such a brilliant word, this takes the prefix “Ver-“ that we saw above, then adds two adjectives before we discover it’s a verb… “schlimm” means bad, and “besser” means “better”, and the “-n” tells us it’s an infinitive. It means that you make something a whole lot worse by foolishly attempting to improve it, like the botched restoration of the Ecce Homo fresco in Spain a few years ago, or when you inexplicably decide that what your carbonara sauce really needs is some cinnamon.

Schadenfreude: this word, like Kindergarten, Wanderlust, Doppelgänger and Weltschmerz, has made it to some other languages, although not everyone knows what it means. Schadenfreude is taken from “Schade”, meaning “shame” or “pity” and “Freude” meaning “joy”. So it means, in plain German, gaining pleasure from someone else’s misery or pain. We borrowed it from German, because no British person ever thought about doing such a thing in the history of the country. Ever. Really…

I lie. Anyhow, some other languages have an equivalent, like Dutch (leedvermaak), Croatian (zluradost), Hungarian (káröröm) and Czech (škodolibost)*, but others just use the German word, including French, Portuguese, and most surprisingly of all, Japanese シャーデンフロイデ – sha-den-fu-roi-de, if you can believe it.

LEARNING THROUGH CULTURE

Finally, it is my opinion that German should be considered as the Latin of the Germanic languages – not because of its age, or being the original Germanic language, neither of which is proven, but because Latin is the basis and foundation for all the other Romance languages, and provides a springboard to better understanding and learning the others. If you know German, it is really not a big leap to learn Danish, Dutch, Luxembourgish, Friesian, Swedish or Norwegian. Despite being a great distance away from Scandinavian languages, on the level of vocabulary there are strong similarities. The same goes for Latin with its descendants, or any of the mightily intertwined Slavic languages.

If you want to learn German or any other language for that matter, the best way to do it is to become familiar with the mindset and mentality of its users. And that is best achieved by learning not only about the history of the country where it is spoken, but also the types of words used by the speakers. And as a very last point, never ever translate word-for-word in your head to try to express or decipher something; because very often when we translate literally what is expressed in one language, it can end up being misconstrued in the target language!

* All of these words are also compounds of other words:

The Dutch “leed” means “suffering” and “vermaak” means “amusement”.

The Croatian word “zlo” means”evil” and “radost” is “happiness”.

The Hungarian “kár” means “damage” and öröm means pleasure.

And the Czech word škoda, yes, that of the car company, means “shame” or “pity” (imagine Czechs saying “I’m off for a drive in my shame”). Oh yes, and “libost” means “pleasure”.